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Driveclub Engine
|released=2014 |platform=PlayStation 4 |game=Driveclub |tools= |license=Proprietary |3rdparty=Simul trueSKYSimul on Twitter: "Yes, Drive Club used #trueSKY, great game!", Havok Paul Rustchynsky on Twitter: "We used Havok as the physics engine, but we did our own car/tyre simulation." |website=https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/driveclub-ps4/ }} Ever Evolving. ''That's one of the many ways to describe the technology behind Driveclub. Engineered to last the lifetime of the very platform it was crafted for,Evolution Studios: "Driveclub engine is powerful enough to last the PS4's lifetime" Driveclub is still renowned to this day for its graphical fidelity. That in itself proves the creator's dreams have become a reality, despite their dissolve. Dynamic Menu When building the original user interface, different technologies were tested but weren't quite right. So they took it back, and used some new technologies to create a seamless and slick, instant, always-on Dynamic Menu, which basically means that you can access all your activity feeds, what’s going on in your profile, what other players are doing in the game, and also interact with the Android and iOS companion apps simultaneously as well. So it’s basically creating something that, whether you’re racing or not racing, you’re part of this Driveclub universe and can stay in touch with your friends and club mates.Driveclub's Game Director Talks Delay, DLC and Taking Over Graphics Driveclub’s engine mirrors the whole nature of the game — it’s all dynamic. Nothing's baked, nothing's faked. Everything is real-time, in a demonstration, the time-of-day was sped up to 500 times and all the clouds visibly rolled by. It’s a fully volumetric cloud system. The same track could be played 20 times in a row and there’ll be a different sunset every time. It all feeds back, and because of the atmospherics and the draw distances it's all mixed in - from the cars to the roads to the mountains to the skies. Everything's reflected in the road surface. And it’s not done just locally to the track surface. You can fly out as far as you like. It goes all the way to the top of the mountain, so if the sun pokes through you'll get massive highlights where the rock formations are. And of course all the materials interact differently. The grass gets wet differently to the rock, which is different to the tarmac, which is different to the plastics. Driveclub’s team developed their own system for actually capturing surface data. This is found around the cars and throughout the world as well. And then, they have highly detailed information on the manufacturers. Wherever they can they've used the data actually used to build the cars. So CAD data in particular, it's as good as the engineers have. There’s quite the mixture of rendering techniques. They’ve got a deferred rendering system, tile-based rendering system, a forward rendering system, all mixed together just to get all the variety one can have in certain situations and put them together. Screen-space effects actually get all the water droplets on the screen. It has a full simulation pass to get proper droplets. It's all modeled too. Because of the atmospherics system, everything has to be modeled. It all sits in and writes at the same level. It's one of those things that's really subtle and helps tie it all in. Anti Aliasing receives a similar mixture template. There's a pixel-based system in use, a temporal-based system, FXAA and a material-based system as well. There’s four systems in place and another for the key points that don't quite hit. The team obsesses about the small details, so another one goes on top of that, to get on top of the very final image quality issues. Handling Model Everything starts with the real data – receiving CAD design modelling of the cars and all the details on the engine torque curves and suspension set-ups, etc.The Guardian - DriveClub and PS4: setting the look and feel of next-gen driving games It's then ported that straight into the game, but taken a step further: the team takes a look at the characteristics of the cars – reading reviews, watching videos, in some cases even drive them. Thinking of what makes it (the vehicles) stand out, they try and implant those aspects into the personality of the car. The aim then, is authenticity but not simulation. As a lot of time refining how player inputs are dealt with. If the player throws a car around the corner then touches the stick in the other direction they need to know how much opposite lock to give them at that time. Give them too much, they'll spin, too little and they'll under-steer. With that in mind, the game's handling model is also designed to keep latency as low as possible. The update rate for how it comes into place, tyre to surface, suspension to car, is much quicker than the actual refresh rate. One of the things the team ''also did when they were coming up with the PlayStation 4 itself was work heavily with the guys designing the controller, to make it much more responsive and much easier to use with driving games as well. Further Information Further information about the engine can be found at the following link(s): * Digital Foundry: Hands-on with DriveClub * Digital Foundry vs DriveClub Sources Category:Engines Category:Racing Engine Category:Work In Progress